By Stuart Mitchner

…often the richest freight will be discharged upon a Jersey shore…

—Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Today is Thoreau’s 206th birthday. I wrote about his 200th in 2017. If you google “Walden Gutenberg,” you can dive into his most famous work and find something that makes you stop and smile or maybe go “Hah!” or “Hmm….” On the front page of Sunday’s New York Times, there’s a reference to “the escapist fantasies of the couture shows” in “a Paris tossed by tumult.” Diving into Walden, I landed on this line: “The head monkey in Paris puts on a traveller’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.” That was in 1854, three years after Moby-Dick was published. You’ll find choice lines all through the “Clothing” section of “Economy,” such as “At present men make shift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors, they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance, whether of space or time, laugh at each other’s masquerade.”

Thoreau and Baseball

As is usually the case, Thoreau’s birthday coincides with the week the Natonal Pastime celebrates itself with the All-Star game. There’s also some opening-day poetry in his journal entry for April 10, 1856: “I associate this day, when I can remember it, with games of base-ball played over beyond the hills in the russet fields toward Sleepy Hollow, where the snow was just melted and dried up.”

Another McPhee

Having just finished John McPhee’s new book Tabula Rasa, Volume 1 (Farrar Straus and Giroux $27), I gave the great Google roulette wheel a spin on “John McPhee and baseball” and up popped a page dominated by John Alexander McPhee (1859-1943), who played for the Cincinnati Reds franchise from 1882 until 1899 and entered the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown with the Class of 2000. Nicknamed “Bid,” according to baseballhall.org, he was known as one of the best defensive second basemen of the 19th century, as well as for playing most of his career without a glove (“True, hot-hit balls do sting a little at the opening of the season, but after you get used to it there is no trouble on that score.”) When he finally used a glove in 1896 after developing a sore on his left hand, he set a record for fielding percentage by a second baseman.

Quoting McPhee

John Angus McPhee of Princeton appears farther down the page in reference to a New York Times review of Levels of the Game (“This may be the high point of American sports journalism”). There are also entries linked to A Sense of Where You Are, McPhee’s acclaimed profile of basketball star Bill Bradley, and The John McPhee Reader, edited and introduced by the late Thoreau scholar William Howarth (1940-2023).

Presented by Farrar Straus as “a review of his career, stressing the work he never completed, and why,” Tabula Rasa is full of lines and passages as quotable as any in Thoreau. If you’ve been religiously reading his recent New Yorker pieces, you’ll have some Yogi Berra “deja vu all over again” moments, as I did when I read his brilliant account of Hemingway’s style (“repeating, advancing, repeating, advancing, like fracture zones in the bed of the ocean”). Since McPhee’s last two books, Draft No. 4 (2017) and The Patch (2018) arrived during the October baseball playoffs, they offered me an opportunity to vent about the playoff misfortunes of the St. Louis Cardinals. The Patch also contains a quote I included in my October 20, 2018 column because I identified with his image of the disciplined, self-denying writer who will put off domestic chores, “excuse himself from the idle crowd, go into his writing sanctum, shut the door, shoot the bolt, and in lonely sacrifice turn on the Mets game.”

Basketball Rules

One of the highlights of Tabula Rasa is McPhee’s account of the day he finally achieved his long-sought goal of publication in the New Yorker, which he presents as “an anti-cautionary tale for young writers, as a chronicle of rejection as a curable disease, and as a reminder that most writers grow slowly over time.” He was still in high school when he decided that what he was determined “to do in life” was write for the New Yorker; he was in college when he sent his first manuscript to the magazine and received the first of many rejection slips that kept coming through his twenties and into his thirties “when the whole of that collection … could have papered a wall.”

In 1962 he was 31 and employed as a staff writer for Time magazine when a New Yorker editor invited him to the magazine’s offices to discuss some samples he’d submitted for the Talk of the Town section. Told the pieces were good but not good enough, McPhee was encouraged to inform the magazine of any “longer projects” he had in mind.

At this point, I have to admit that I had problems with the detailed scene in Tabula Rasa where McPhee seems to be about to lose his first sale to the New Yorker because he’d simultaneously submitted the same piece to Sports Illustrated, no doubt because it was about his experience playing basketball “for the University of Cambridge against Her Majesty’s Royal Fusiliers in the central courtyard of the Tower of London.”

My problem was attempting to fairly paraphrase a scene I found completely riveting. I read it in a dentist’s waiting room and if anyone had been watching, they’d have thought I was reading the denouement of a tragedy. I was pulling for poor McPhee as if he were a Dickensian character begging for his life.

In the happiest of endings, “Basketball and Beefeaters” appeared in the March 1963 issue of the New Yorker, and thus did basketball lead to the breakthrough culminating in McPhee’s profile of Bill Bradley, which the New Yorker bought in November 1964, published in January 1965, and finally, around the time of his 34th birthday, John McPhee became a New Yorker staff writer, with a “best efforts” contract that meant he simply agreed to give his “best efforts” to the magazine.

A Visceral Connection

Having grown up in Indiana, home of Hoosier Hysteria,  I read McPhee’s “chronicle of rejection as a curable disease” as if he were firing one long distance shot after another at a microscopic hoop high up on the facade of the charismatic building at 25 West 43 Street, his first best shot almost blocked at the last minute; then, as the buzzer sounds, he fires and scores the shot of his life. I felt a visceral connection with the moment when McPhee was begging for the life of his story because I grew up eating breakfast and lunch for years in the presence of a large folding screen of New Yorker covers fashioned by my parents, both of whom had been submitting stories there in the years before and after I was born. The only two stories my father ever sold — to Esquire and the Ladies Home Journal — were whimsical pieces that had been expressly styled for the
New Yorker. And I carried on the family tradition, collecting a bundle of thank-you-but-no-thanks rejections, if not quite enough to paper a wall, my heart leaping up every time someone wading through the slush pile scrawled an encouraging word at the bottom of that neat, tidy, deadly little slip.

A Chill

After giving up life as a mid-list novelist and flash-in-the-pan poet, I began writing for a weekly newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey, in November 2003. One of the first books I reviewed, on February 4, 2004, was John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens, which I brazenly suggested “often achieves the timeless quality of the nature writing of Henry David Thoreau.” McPhee was also the subject of my first review of 2006 (“Placing John McPhee: A Sense of Where He Is”). One morning a month later there was a letter on my desk. Not an email, but an actual handwritten letter from John McPhee. After two-plus years, I’d had a few appreciative messages, but the sight of this one, even before I read it, literally thrilled me, producing an actual chill along the back of my neck. The note inside — which ended with reference to “that wonderful set of remarks you made in ‘Town Topics’ last month” — was an affirmation of the thought I had when I applied for the job. Yes, I would be writing for a humble weekly delivered free to residents of the town. But this, after all, was Princeton! — where on July 12, 2017, Will Howarth sent me an email about my 200th anniversary tribute in which he shared Thoreau’s only mention of Princeton, noted in the Journal for October 24-25, 1853: “Left at 7:30 a.m. for New York, by boat to Tacony and rail via Bristol, Trenton, Princeton (near by), new Brunswick, Rahway, Newark, etc. Uninteresting, except the boat.”

Back to Baseball

At the All-Star Game break, the St. Louis Cardinals are in last place in the Central Division of the National League, 11.5 games behind John Alexander McPhee’s old team the Cincinnati Reds. It’s been 30 years since the Cardinals were this far back. My wife wonders why I still have hope. She should know by now. We’ve been married for over 50 years, through eight National League pennants and four world championships, from Bob Gibson to Ozzie Smith to Albert Pujols and Yadier Molina, and this is the first time she’s questioned my faith. Time to talk of poetry, and as Thoreau says in his journal for January 26, 1840: “No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself…. You might as well think to go in pursuit of the rainbow, and embrace it on the next hill.”